With the dark comedy and sharp observations of Monica Heisey and Dolly Alderton a whip-smart
and laugh-out-loud funny debut novel about a disgraced newly divorced journalist demoted to a
“clickbait” job at a Manhattan tabloid. The first thing they tell you when you begin your
training is never to become the news. Natasha has screwed up royally. Her mistake isn’t just
embarrassing it's a breach of journalistic ethics that makes headlines and costs her a plum
job reporting from London. Back in New York at thirty-five and single divorced from a kind man
she loved she finds herself at the bottom of the media food chain—a junior reporter at a
clickbait factory rewriting sensational tabloid stories to make them just different enough to
avoid lawsuits. As if her professional fall from grace weren’t bad enough she’s taken the
money she’d saved for a down payment for a home on a charming Brooklyn block with her husband
and rashly bought a boxy apartment overlooking the gray ocean in Rockaway Beach Queens.
Though seeing friends and family only serves to remind her of what she’s lost things begin to
pick up when her ex-boyfriend Zach moves back to New York and accepts her offer of a spare
bedroom. The arrangement is strictly platonic of course—for him. But Natasha can't help but
wonder whether he might be the solution to all her problems. As Natasha's obsession with Zach
grows and her involvement in increasingly dystopian "churnalism" deepens her worlds threaten
to collide in the most cataclysmic extremely public way.
